A User's Guide to Medieval Shapeshifting

PART one

A Wildly Incomplete History of Taking the Piss

Deep in the grimy armpit of Viking thought, as Neil Price divulges in Children of Ash and Elm, there lurks a thing called the hamr. Now, the hamr is not something so dull and disappointing as a fresh pair of trousers. Oh no. It's the very skin of the soul, if you please. The soul's overcoat. Not just any old Tom, Dick, or Harald could slip into a different hamr whenever the fancy struck. No, no, no. That was reserved for the emotionally theatrical, or otherwise accursed. Transformations are neither casual, never 'oh, I think I'll pop into a bear-shape before breakfast,' but summoned by the proper alchemical cocktail of melodrama, moonlight, and misfortune.

(For more on Vikings and their music, and Neil Price, see Viola d'amore)

Right, so. Creation myths, yes?

They differ wildly, as you'd expect when you're dealing with the business of explaining everything. But most scholars reckon it kicked off properly around the eighth century BCE. Right about when Homer rolled out of bed one morning, caught his reflection in a polished shield, and went, 'BLOODY HELL! Of course! Cyclops!'

One eye, big problem.

Monsters became the go-to move for clownin' human foolishness.

Or... well.

Actually no.

I made that up.

But it sounds rather good, doesn't it? The man understood epic proportions, I'll give him that.

If you're hunting for the origins of grotesque, giggling monstrosity, don't bother rifling through Tolkien's musty old drawers or thumbing through Merlin's dusty grimoires. Instead, follow the scent of olives to ancient Greece, where sandal-rockin', beard-strokin' psilosophers had been taking the mickey out of gods and mortals alike for millennia.

Take the sixth century BCE, and Aesop's Fables: talking animals with bite-sized moral agendas. Then hop to 423 BCE, and Aristophanes storms in with The Clouds, a comedic takedown of philosophers, intellectual pretension, and father-son beef. Then there's The Birds (414 BCE), a chaotic featherstorm of divine authority and earthly nonsense in which humans build a sky-city to flip off both the gods and the bureaucrats.

Of course, no satirical stew is complete without a generous ladle from the Roman larder. Enter Juvenal, whose Saturae (c. 100–127 AD) gave us Juvenalian satire. This is your Animal Farm, your Nineteen Eighty-Four: dystopia not as escapism, but as a sword of moral indignation, swung by someone who's absolutely had it with your nonsense.

Odysseus and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse (1891)

There's his gentler cousin, Horace. Dude played it smooth. Horatian satire. It chuckles at your folly, buys you a pint, and reminds you that you're being a bit of a twit. Less guillotine, more poke with a poetry stick.

And then there's Burlesque, not the fishnet-and-feathers kind, but the literary technique: treating the solemn ridiculously, and the ridiculous with solemn reverence. Which, frankly, is fantasy's whole deal. Talking swords? Dead serious.

Fast forward to the medieval and Renaissance, where things get theological. The Divine Comedy (1321) sends Dante spiralling through the afterlife like a holy tourist, armed with divine commentary and the most judgmental tour guide in literary history.

Meanwhile, Erasmus's In Praise of Folly (1509) hands the mic to Lady Folly herself, who proceeds to roast the Church, the state, academia, and anyone else standing too close to power. Then there's Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516). Part epic, part farce, full of moon trips, magic rings, and fourth-wall breaks.

By 1605, Cervantes drops Don Quixote, dismanteling the entire chivalric tradition.

And then there's Shakespeare, who gives us A Midsummer Night's Dream (c.1595): a labyrinth of fairies, potions, romantic chaos, and theatrical disasters.

By the Enlightenment, satire had hit its stride. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) turned fantastical voyages into savage critiques of politics, science, colonialism, and human absurdity.

Voltaire's Candide (1759) took a sledgehammer to the sunny optimism of Enlightenment philosophy, gleefully dismantling the idea that we live in 'the best of all possible worlds', especially when that world is on fire.

In short: while it may look like you're reading about an elven uprising in the Glitterbuns Realm, what you're actually getting is a pointed critique of late-stage capitalism. It's not so much about elves and goblins as it is about zooming out far enough to realise just how ridiculous everything is. (And it is.)

Though the roots of satirical fantasy stretch deep into classical and early modern literature, the tradition that most directly shaped British authors like Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and their ilk can be traced to a more specific cultural flashpoint: the founding of Punch, or The London Charivari in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and Ebenezer Landells. This weekly magazine became a cornerstone of British satire, famous for its wit, political irreverence, and delight in lampooning everything from crumbling empires to tedious dinner parties. It set the tone for a distinctly British blend of clever absurdity and eyebrow-lifted critique, a tone that would echo through generations of fantastical mischief-makers.

But Punch didn't emerge in a vacuum. The rise of industrialism brought with it a surge in literacy, while chaps like Hans Christian Andersen and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, alongside the Pre-Raphaelites, helped ignite a cultural revival of medievalism, gothic horror, and the fantastical. The nineteenth century saw a new appetite for wonder and shadow: Frankenstein (1818), Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), and Dracula (1897) are all landmarks of this eerie renaissance.

This shift wasn't confined to literature, music echoed the same strange magic, with Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Bartók, Stravinsky, Satie, and Debussy conjuring sonic worlds full of myth, madness, and mystery. In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, and by 1843, Dickens had penned A Christmas Carol, a ghost story laced with moral satire and socioeconomic angst wrapped in tinsel.

Simultaneously, key medieval and mythological texts were being rediscovered or reimagined. Take The Mabinogion (twelfth-thirteenth century), translated by Lady Charlotte Guest in 1838. It offered something radical to a Victorian audience: characters with agency, contradiction, and weirdness: more Homer than Plato, more human than allegorical. Its influence echoes clearly in later modern fantasy (see: The Silmarillion), laying groundwork for tales where gods bleed, kings doubt, and the magical is inseparable from the mortal.

The rediscovery and transcription of Beowulf throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped shape the evolving landscape of fantasy literature. It's no coincidence that Tolkien, a Beowulf scholar and philologist, would go on to become one of the genre's founding architects. The bones of the dragon he studied would later roar to life in The Hobbit and beyond.

Meanwhile, fantasy and its science fiction cousin became playgrounds for society's what-ifs, testing morals, futures, and the absurdity of bureaucracy without having to involve Reality's lawyers.

Early sci-fi classics like H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) paved the way for authors like Douglas Adams to point out that the future, much like the past, is crawling with morons wielding laser guns.

Literary nonsense had emerged as a genre in its own right. Edward Lear (1812–1888), in A Book of Nonsense (1846) and The Owl and the Pussycat (1870), played gleefully with logic, language, and form, not satire in the Juvenalian sense, but a vital precursor to surreal and absurdist comedy. His work laid the groundwork for the later flourishes of Lewis Carroll and, eventually, the looping logic spirals of modern absurdist fantasy.

In 1853, Richard Wagner began his operatic transfiguration of Nordic myth with Das Rheingold, setting the stage for high-stakes fantasy wrapped in thunderous drama. A few years later, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862) explored forbidden fruit and sisterly salvation with rich, symbolic verse. Jules Michelet's La Sorcière (1862) reminded us that real historians can fabricate myth more extravagantly than most novelists, blending scholarship and sensationalism in a way that would echo through later historical fantasies.

In 1866, Sabine Baring-Gould published Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, providing easily digestible mythic fuel for contemporary fantasists. Théophile Gautier's Spirite ventured into paranormal romance, while William Gilbert's The Magic Mirror revealed the Victorian imagination at full tilt, wish-fulfilment fantasies filtered through moral tension and mirror-world metaphors.

The time has come,' the Walrus said,
'To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.

Then came Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) transformed literary nonsense into philosophical subversion. Dream-logic, puns, paradoxes... Carroll poked elegant holes in Victorian certainty with a flamingo mallet. The Hunting of the Snark gave a mock-epic of confusion and futility dressed in rhyme and whimsy. This tradition of structured absurdity flows directly into The Goon Show, Monty Python, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Discworld.

Also in 1871 came Thespis, the first collaboration between W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Their operettas, The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore, and others, revelled in absurdity, parodying class, empire, and bureaucracy. They helped define the rhythm, tone, and satirical targets of British fantasy humour. You can draw a straight line from the Lord High Executioner to the guild-run chaos of Ankh-Morpork.

Oscar Wilde added his own flourish to the fantastical: The Sphinx (1884) offered a decadent tour of cosmic and mythic imagination, while The Canterville Ghost (1887) brought sophistication to the humorous ghost story.

Satire, though, wasn't confined to ghosts and goblins. The Diary of a Nobody (serialised in Punch, 1888–89) by George and Weedon Grossmith turned its gaze to the hilariously mundane struggles of suburban life, proving that the fantastical isn't a prerequisite for satire, self-importance and bureaucracy will do just fine.

Meanwhile, William Morris pushed fantasy forward with The Wood Beyond the World (1894), one of the first fully imagined secondary worlds, rich in supernatural elements and medieval textures. Earlier works like George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858) and William Beckford's Vathek (1786) also deserve mention, blending fantasy with gothic, exotic, and spiritual stylings.

Morris's medievalist vision can be read as a reaction to industrialisation and the anxieties of modernity. Much of fantasy's affection for pseudo-medieval settings, all towers, swords, and clean peasants, reflects a cultural longing for a world where problems could be solved with a sword or a quest, rather than paperwork and supply chains.

Arras, Médiathèque de l'Abbaye Saint-Vaast, CGM 863 (1043), f. 161v

Even Shakespeare's Lysander got it, fleeing the rule-bound world of Athens to the edge of civilisation; to the not-the-city, where magic, mischief, and truth could roam free. That liminal playground stretches all the way back to the grotesques in medieval manuscripts. Killer rabbits, jousting snails, musical monkeys... visual nonsense that echoed older, mythical, margins: Polyphemus, trickster gods, and shapeshifters. Figures always on the edge of the story, breaking the frame.